Marcus and FreshwindElara walked hand-in-hand, a comfortable silence between them as they entered a desolate stretch of the Barrens. The ground here was nothing but a pale, bluish-gray expanse of rock, a landscape stripped bare of anything green or soft.
At the heart of this wasteland lay a shallow, sunken basin, a bizarre graveyard of strange rock formations and crudely carved stone beasts. This was the Stone Carving Forest.
It had once been a working quarry, the stone blocks hewn from its depths used for everything from city walls to the very statues now scattered across the ground. But a decade ago, a deep blast had cracked the earth, revealing a massive, gaping cavern. Ever since, a potent, raw energy had been seeping out of the fissure.
